Wednesday 2nd November see’s the culmination of Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations and we wouldn’t want to miss out on the fun, so we’re joining the party by giving away a free glass of tequila and sangrita to anyone who comes in for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

In Mexico, Day Of The Dead is a festival to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have passed away, and often sees groups of people partying on down at their family cemetery. This festival’s incredible colour and imagery is a great example of why we love Mexico quite so much. In fact, you can check out some more about it here.

Everyone who wants one gets a free tequila, the only thing we ask is that you sip it, and don’t shoot it down in one. This isn’t your average tequila – We’re giving you a measure of multi-award winning El Tesoro de Don Philipe, one of the world’s finest. To complete your full introduction to the world of top tequilas, we’ll be giving you a glass of our homemade sangrita to accompany it – Just as it’s drunk in Mexico.

We hope we’ll see you down here to join in the fun.

From Tuesday 2nd to Thursday 4th November, we’re celebrating Day Of The Dead at Wahaca, with a free glass of tequila for everyone. Not just any tequila either – It’s our brand spanking new, multi-award winning house pour, El Tesoro Reposado that’s on offer to anyone sensible enough to realise that tequila doesn’t have to mean a wincing face and a morning of regret. Oh no, this stuff is good. There will also be plenty of our home made sangrita available (That’s the nice spiced tomato and orange juice that’s every tequilas favourite sidekick).

If you’re not sure what Day Of The Dead is all about, it’s one of our favourite Mexican festivals and worth checking out. It coincides with all saints and all souls day and in Mexico it’s a way of celebrating the lives of friends and family who have died. It sounds like it would be quite a sombre affair, but not a bit of it. Any excuse for a party eh!

We’ll also be giving you the chance to win a signed copy of Tommi’s book each day of our celebrations – To enter you need to fold up one of our origami skulls (that you’ll find in the centrefold of our new Ola London) and upload a photo of yourself to our facebook page. We’ll pick our favourite each day who will be the happy recipients of a book so they can recreate those Mexican masterpieces themselves at home.

So if you fancy a bit of a knees up, and want to get your hands on some of the world’s best tequila, (yes we think it’s that good), then come along from Tuesday 2nd to Thursday 4th November.

We’re having a lot of fun this week with the launch of our new restaurant in Canary Wharf, so we thought we’d devote some of this edition of the Weekly Blog Round Up to other launches we’ve seen in the blogosphere.

Could this be the first step in a movement away from carrying your wallet around?? Touch My Apps investigates…

Could you see yourself using a Wahapp to order your delicious Wahaca food?

Waitrose are launching another marvel “The Great Sweet Revival”. After finding out exactly which of these classic treats were most popular via a consumer poll, they will be offering Monty Bojangles sweets in stores near you. Admirably Monty Bojangles is evolving these classics to contain no artificial colours or flavourings. See what Ruby Room has to say here.

Other than launches, there’s been some other great stuff going on. Here’s a review by From Chile to Chocolate about a superb evening at The British Museum about Mexican Food, that included one of our favourite people, Diana Kennedy and Tommi.

And while we’re on the subject of The British Museum, here is a video and some photos posted on The British Museum website.

If you see anything that you think we should include in next week’s round up, let us know by emailing us at loswahacos@wahaca.co.uk or by leaving a comment.

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Day of the Dead Cocktail

For Day of the Dead, we got Sami our barman to dream up a delicious Day of the Dead cocktail which is so good we’ve given it a permanent place on the menu.

In a cocktail shaker add:

35ml of aged 100% agave tequila

80ml of fresh pineapple juice

and the juice of half a lime

Shake vigorously and pour into a tall glass filled with ice.

Carefully top with a good splash of red wine and garnish with mint. (To get an eerie effect pour the wine in over the back of a table spoon so it sits on top).

Chorizo, pumpkin and thyme quesadillas

Quesadillas, crispy and oozing with melted cheese and anything else you fancy is always a winner.  The sweet flavour of pumpkin seems to go incredibly well with chorizo.  This very easy recipe will take very little time to put together and makes a delicious, relaxed dinner.  I like to eat it with a crisp Cos lettuce, sesame seed and avocado salad.

Enough for 4 large quesadillas

500g slice of pumpkin, peeled and cut into rough chunks

½ onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

200g chopped chorizo sausage meat

A small bunch of thyme, shredded

Olive oil

200g extra mature cheddar cheese, grated

200g grated mozzarella

4 large corn tortillas

Steam the pumpkin until tender, about 15-20 minutes.  Allow to cool, before dicing up into small pieces.  Cook the onion in a heavy-bottomed pan with the chorizo until the onion is soft and translucent and the chorizo has started to release its oil.  Add the garlic and cook for a further five minutes before adding the diced pumpkin and thyme.  Season to taste.

Spread the chorizo mix on one half of the tortilla and sprinkle with the cheese mix.  Fold the tortilla over so that you have a half moon. Brush it with a little olive oil (so the tortilla doesn’t stick to the pan) and place in hot, dry frying pan or griddle and cook until golden and crisp.

Cut into wedges and serve with a roast jalapeno salsa or fresh tomato salsa and sour cream.

I hope you enjoyed our post on Day of the Dead and the history behind it. Wahaca has its own way of celebrating Day of the Dead – i hope you will come join in on Monday 2nd and Tuesday 3rd November at both Covent Garden and Westfield restaurants.

We have some fun and colourful decorations by artist Talulah who has made the most amazing crazy large skull masks, each individually painted. We think these may become a permanent fixture! Photos to follow….

We are also giving a shot of Gran Centenario Reposado tequila to all our customers from Monday through to Tuesday – hope you will all come make the most of this! The caramel, tropical fruit and spices of this tequila make it a wonderful treat to enjoy with your food.

Make sure you look out for the t-shirts designed by us especially for Day of the Dead that the team will be wearing and some of our favourite Day of the Dead recipes are on the way too!

Any recipe that can lure a spirit back from the dead must be worth trying! So we thought we’d look at a few famous ideas from Mexico before we tell you what we’ll be doing next weekend.

Similar to many other countires, pumpkin is very popular in Mexico at this time of the year. Pumpkin slices are slowly simmered with Piloncillo (like Palm Sugar) and other spices to make “Candied Pumpkin”.

A special Bread of The Dead or Pan de Muerto is also cooked. This is a soft bread decorated with bone shapes or sometimes even moulded into the shape of skulls like the ones here from La Familia Brophy.

The most famous delicacy over DOTD is the Sugar Skull. Simply made by moulding sugar, water and meringue powder into skeletal shapes, these skulls are highly decorated and handed out for all to enjoy. We found some great examples captured by Glen on Flickr:

Of course, no Mexican celebration would be complete without tequila cocktails! Highly prized competitions are held every year to see who can invent the tastiest concoction, often prepared in the craziest of ways. Who knows what our fabulous bar staff will create this year!

Stay tuned to hear what we’ve got planned to celebrate Day of The Dead at Wahaca.

Image from Paul and Jill on Flickr

Every year, on November 1st (All Saints Day) and 2nd (All Souls Day), something unique takes place in many areas of Mexico: Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. This eerie sounding festival is Mexico’s celebration for when dead relatives, both young and old, are allowed to return to the mortal world for two days. Spirits come down and walk among the living, sampling earthly treats and joining in the festival.

Its similar to our Halloween, however instead of scary goblins and blood curdling monsters, the Mexicans welcome back the spirits of their families with the delicious smell of food in the air, tasty candies decorated like skulls, and lighted candles to guide them home again. Day of the dead is symbolised by skulls and skeletons (the Nahua speaking peoples of pre-columbian Mexico saw the skull as a symbol of life – not death.) which appear in abundance around this time in both shops and homes. Families and friends will gather together at the gravestones of loved ones where they will tell stories remembering them and engage in sprucing up the gravesite, decorating it with flowers, setting out and enjoying a picnic whilst paying respects to the deceased whenever they arrive! The meals prepared for these picnics are sumptuous, usually featuring meat dishes in spicy sauces and chocolate beverages. Because of this warm social environment, the colorful setting, and the abundance of food, drink and good company, the festival continues to be one of the most important in the Mexican calendar and is warmly embraced around the world.

The original celebration can be traced to the many Mesoamerican native traditions such as the Aztec festival presided over by the “Lady of the Dead” which was dedicated to children and the dead. In the Aztec calendar, this ritual fell roughly at the end of the Gregorian month of July and the beginning of August, but after the Spanish failed to eradicate the tradition post conquering Mexico the Spanish priests moved the event so that it coincided with the Christian holiday of All Saints Day (Halloween) This was a vain effort to transform the observance from a non-religious event to a Christian celebration. The result is that Mexicans now celebrate the day of the dead during the first two days of November, rather than at the beginning of summer.

Mexicans do not fear death they recognize it, embrace it, mock it and even defy it through this tradition!

Watch this space for some of our special Day of the Dead recipes leading up to our celebrations for this festival.

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